Sept. 11 BUSPH Forum to Discuss Public Health Issues at Guantanamo Bay Prison
The BU School of Public Health (BUSPH) will hold the semester’s first public health forum on Wednesday, Sept. 11, and will examine timely and critical public health issues among prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
Sondra Crosby, MD is the featured speaker. She is an associate professor of medicine at BU School of Medicine and Medical School and BUSPH.
An internist and former co-director of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at Boston Medical Center, her clinical practice focuses on care of asylum seekers and refugees. Crosby has written over 200 affidavits documenting medical and psychological sequelae of torture. She has published scholarly papers in multiple peer-reviewed journals in the field of caring for survivors of torture and was awarded the 2008 Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.
Crosby served as a medical consultant to the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) to review evidence of torture. In addition to her work for the Commission, she was to return to Bahrain to examine dozens of hunger strikers protesting government actions.
During the past year, Dr. Crosby taught medical forensics and implemented the Istanbul Protocol for physicians in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. She has also traveled to Reyhanli, Turkey conducting training on effective medical documentation of alleged torture and mentoring Syrian physicians. In Istanbul, Crosby trained Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region physicians on medical documentation of torture.
This forum will be held Sept. 11, noon-1 p.m. in Room L112. It is presented by the BUSPH Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights and Global Lawyers & Physicians, a BUSPH-affiliated non-profit, non-governmental group that focuses on health and human rights issues.